August 27, 2020 • 46 mins
Baratunde lays the spiritual foundation for the show. His first guest, Valarie Kaur, activist and author of See no Stranger, helps us go inward to ready our hearts and minds for How To Citizen. Welcome to the show!
In December 2016, activist, lawyer, and Sikh faith leader Valarie Kaur, asked this question in her Prayer for America: “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country still waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor?” Nearly four years later, Baratunde could think of no better spiritual invocation for this show than a conversation with Valarie, the author of See No Stranger. In the premiere episode of this podcast, Baratunde and Valarie discuss the role of love, joy and relationships in reimagining and reclaiming the act of being a citizen.
Show Notes
We are grateful to Valarie Kaur for helping us give birth to this show.
Buy her book See No Stranger here at our online bookshop for the show that supports local bookstores.
Check out her Revolutionary Love Project; Dive into her curriculum at SeeNoStranger.com and follow @valariekaur on Twitter.
We will post this episode, a transcript, show notes and more at howtocitizen.com.
ACTION FOR THIS EPISODE, HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN DO
Take 10-15 minutes to think about the questions below - ideal is to let yourself write down any thoughts that come to mind. It’s not about putting down a single word answer for each. Laying this internal foundation will be important as we start to take actions outward in relationship with others.
Number 1: What is your super power in our fight to make society better for us all? (voice, pen, bank account)
Number 2: What protects you, and who has your back when things get tough? (law degree, social media feed)
Number 3: Who is your beloved community, the group of people you connect with most deeply? (show up with you when things get hard)
Number 4: What object or activity will ground and center you, reminding you who you are?
Number 5: Where do you find joy, and how will you protect your joy every day?
We’d love to hear your reflections to one or all of these questions - email us action@howtocitizen.com. Mention Episode 1 in the subject line.
We love feedback - comments@howtocitizen.com.
Visit Baratunde's website to sign up for his newsletter to learn about upcoming guests and live tapings, and more. Follow him on Instagram or join his Patreon. You can even text him, like right now at 202-894-8844.
How To Citizen with Baratunde is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts. executive produced by Miles Gray, Nick Stumpf, Elizabeth Stewart, and Baratunde Thurston. Produced by Joelle Smith, edited by Justin Smith. Powered by you.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is How to Citizen with Baritune Day, a show
where we reimagine the word citizen, reclaim it from those
who weaponized it, and remind us all of our collective power.
We have a definition of this civic power which is
broad and goes far beyond the purely political. This show
is not how a bill becomes a law. This show
(00:24):
is about power and who has the power to determine
the quality of our lives. We believe the correct answer
is all of us. Welcome to our very first episode,
Pray Revolutionary Love is How to Citizen. I'm Baritune Day.
(00:44):
I've been working on this show for years. I've been
dreaming of seeing or hearing something like it for most
of my adult life, and at this present time it
feels urgent. We are in an intense moment of history,
of pandemic, of revolution, of way too many straining services.
Am I right? Our democracy is at a tipping point?
(01:08):
But which way it tips? That's up to us. We're
making this show to help tip it in the direction
of more justice and more power for more people. And yeah,
I said, this is episode zero. See what had happened? Was?
Our plan for episode one involved two guests but then
we heard that first guest in that conversation, or should
(01:31):
I say our zero guest. We heard her words and
we knew we needed to give them an entire episode
so they could breathe, so you could breathe with them,
because she's so eloquently expressed the spiritual core of what
we're all about. We have long felt that the concept
of how to citizen it's really about our relationship with
(01:54):
each other, but also our relationship with ourselves. And in
order to truly be in community with each other, to
show up for one another, we have to show up
for ourselves, and that may involve examining who we are,
examining our relationship with ourselves first. This episode's guest is
(02:16):
the perfect person to help us in that project because
she has a definition of citizenship that includes more than
external actions in the world out there. She conceives of
a role with internal changes we must make to our
minds and to our hearts. I think of this episode
as the spiritual invocation of the project we're about to
(02:38):
embark on. So check out my conversation with Valerie Kaer.
Stay until the end, because we're gonna give you some
things you can do and welcome to the show, citizen.
I'm holding the book of my very refers guests, Valerie
(03:01):
Cower right here see No Stranger, a memoir and manifesto
Revolutionary Love. And when I look at the back cover,
it's got a long list. Valerie, got a long list
of dope commas separated value uh to represent some of
your contributions to this world. Civil rights activist, lawyer, filmmaker, innovator,
(03:23):
founder of the Revolutionary Love Project. But I'm gonna give
a long winded intro, and I bear some patience with me, Valerie,
because I think I need to do this. I think
our listeners need to hear this, and I want you
to hear it. In November of I woke up after
that election, having watched that election with a group of
about ten people, only two of whom had all four
(03:44):
parents born in the United States of America. We were
a witnessing of immigrants to our minds and hears tragic
moment in US history. Roughly a month after that, I'm
hanging out on Facebook. We're only bad things have it
as far as I was concerned at that time, like
that's where bad news comes to hunt you down. That's
(04:04):
where Russians interfere with the election. And I saw you,
I saw you say these words that spoke so true. Uh,
that said, what if this darkness that we're feeling that
we're in is not the darkness of the tomb, but
the darkness of the womb. And this isn't the death
of our country, this is the birth. And that really
(04:28):
moved me, and it still moves me to even say it,
to be able to say it to you. And then
a few months later I met you and I screamed
from across the crowded room like some film scene, that's
the woman who moved me with such poetry because it
has felt like such a dark time. That day felt dark,
but we've been in years of what has seemed to
(04:50):
be like darkness. So I say that as a setup. One,
thank you very much for that moment and for being
a light in darkness to help draw so many of
us out of that. Two. Welcome to how to citizens.
It's good to have you. That is a welcome, sir.
(05:12):
Thank you, brother, You're very welcome. Thank you. Can I
say you can say that's why you're here? Please say
that question? Is this the darkness of the tomb? Or
is this the darkness of the womb. It is the
question I have been asking myself every day, and I
think it's both. I think it's both. When you know
(05:35):
almost a hundred and fifty thousand people have been killed
by this virus, the scale and scope of which was
preventable if we had real leadership, disproportionately people of color.
When we see George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, Race, Shard Brooks,
all those that we have lost that we will never
be able to get back, it feels as though death
has one and there's also a bit of dying of
(05:58):
the notion of the nation that we thought we were.
And yet we're also seeing millions of people flood city
streets in their grief, in their rage, rising up, breathing together,
reimagining together in a revolutionary moment for black lives and
racial justice that frankly, I never thought I would see
in my lifetime. And when we see, you know, a
(06:21):
wall of white people in front of black people, kneeling
in the street, in front of an army of police officers,
these are images we didn't see or two, and so
I keep thinking, am I seeing glimpses? Are we seeing glimpses?
Of the America that is longing to be so yeah,
breathe and push. Just breathe and breathe and push. You
(06:45):
have acknowledged, built on, borrowed from a number of traditions
in your work, Valerie. You are a lawyer. You have
a degree in law, you have a degree in divinity,
you have a degree of bachelor's arts from a lot
of institutions, are very credentialed. The thing that I'm actually
most curious about it came very early in your books,
you know, Stranger. You wrote, I grew up on forty
(07:09):
acres in Clovis, California, and I want to know did
you have a mule as well? Like did you have
forty acres and the mule, because I'm just I'm still
looking for that. And I was like, we didn't even
have a cow. My dad got the cow, but I
(07:29):
just got strawberries. And yeah, my my family has lived
and farmed in California for more than a century. And
so I grew up with such a deep connection to
this land, to this soil. And I was raised with
my grandparents, so I still grew up with the stories
and the scriptures and the songs of my sick faith
(07:50):
and so that was my orientation to the world. And
you know, it wasn't severed, of course, until I experienced
my first racial slur, like so many of us young
kids of color. And I feel like my whole life
has been a journey of returning to feeling at home
in my body, at home in the world. The project
(08:12):
that we are embarking on, not just as a podcast
but as a society. You know, it feels like we
have this moment, we're at this tipping point, and which
way we tip is not a foregone conclusion. It's not
guaranteed to be great, but it's also not guaranteed to
be devastating. So tomb or womb feels like it's up
to us. Yes, you just said in my body. And
(08:35):
I think there's a lot of this work which feels
very external. It's about giving money to organizations. It is
about getting to know our neighbors, you know, as real people,
and supporting folks on the ground doing work, and re
engaging with our democracy, with our bodies out there. But
what do you think, and you might have some thoughts
(08:56):
on the internal work. What is the body of each
of us? How do we get in touch with that?
What is the role of that, I think in this
act of citizenship of power to the people. Yes, Naco
Betty nahibgana Naco Betty nehi Beganna, I see no enemy,
I see no stranger. These were the words of God Noni,
(09:20):
the founder of the Sick Faith. And really he was
just lifting up a call to love that has been
on the lips of Indigenous leaders and spiritual teachers and
social reformers for so many centuries. And this is not
about a belief that we hold in our head. I mean,
anti racism is in the air, and so many good
people are holding it as an idea in their minds,
like trying to be anti racist, trying to be and
(09:42):
actually it doesn't work. To be truly anti racist is
to orient to the world in a new way. And
so I'm inviting people into thinking about what it means
to see no stranger. George Floyd, brother, Brianna Taylor, sister,
their children, our children. When we see no stranger, when
we are brave enough to see no stranger, than it
(10:04):
must mean being brave enough to let their grief into
our own hearts and to fight for them when they
are in harm's way. So revolutionary love is when we
are brave enough to see no strangers, not out there
and not in here. And for so many people of color,
we live in a culture that wants to make us
strange to ourselves, that wants to sever us from our
(10:25):
own inner knowing. And so the book See No Stranger
is about what it means to practice love, to labor
and love for others, even for opponents, and for ourselves.
It's a way of moving through the world that is
both personal and political, and it's how we last. I
I really, brother, You talked about leaving the country, you know,
not by choice. I actually left the country by choice
(10:47):
for the election. Right. I was so breathless. People were saying, well,
how do we breathe? How do we push? And I said,
I don't know. I know in here, but I don't
know out here. And so I was given a gift
that very few women who are mothers and activists are
ever a given. It was given time off and a
room of my own, and I went to a rainforest
in Central America with my family, and I took my
(11:07):
first deep breath, and I had taken in so many years, really,
since nine eleven, since I had become an activist, and
I poured through the stories of my life, and through
the stories of social movements in the past, and through
our wisdom traditions, and I began to see patterns which
I came to call practices of revolutionary love. And so
I wrote this book for my own survival, so that
(11:28):
I could come back to the country and last. I
believe when we labor in love, it's how we last.
And I want to last. I want to grow old.
I want to grow old with you. You mentioned September eleven,
(11:50):
two thousand one, as a moment of the birth of
your own activism. What does that event and the consequences
of it, What does that meant for you? Oh, it
was a new era for us, for all of us,
but especially for those of us who are Muslim or sick.
In the wake of the horror of those attacks, we
know that hate violence, you know, erupted across city streets.
And the first person killed and I hate crime after
(12:12):
nine eleven was biber sing Sodi, a man I knew,
a sick, turbaned father who I called uncle. So this
was before social media, This was before we had any
channels any ways to tell our own stories. Right, We
barely had email. There were just list serves where people
are saying, my father has been shot, my brother has
been beaten. Helped us, someone save us. And I was
(12:34):
a twenty year old college kid. I had an old camera.
I got in my car, I drove across the country
and began capturing these stories of my community. And that
was the beginning of my life as an activist. And
you know, back then, Bartunday, we we thought that, we
even called it the backlash. You know, we thought it
was going to be this narrow, finite era in history
(12:56):
that we would look back on, and the back flash
never end. It. We're almost twenty years later, and sick
and Muslim Americans are five times more likely to be
targets of hate than we were before nine eleven. And
with every film, with every lawsuit, with every campaign, I
thought we were making the nation safer for the next generation.
And then this president takes power, hate crimes skyrocket once again,
(13:16):
rivaling what we saw after nine eleven. And now I'm
a new mother, and I thought, oh my god, my
son is being raised in a country more dangerous for
him than it was for me or even for my grandfather,
who arrived a hundred years ago. How am I going
to last? So the labor for justice? And black people
know this, You know I came to this late. Right,
you all noticed that the labor for justice is long
(13:38):
and hard, and it may go on after we leave
this earth. And so how do we last? How do
we labor in love so the labor itself becomes an
end in itself, that the labor becomes joyful. I believe
that laboring for justice with with joy is the meaning
of life. You you use a phrase days in the
(14:00):
book that I have tried to use to describe this
show that I've seen others doing similar work do, which
is living in community. We're inside of an experiment, right,
We're in a petriot dish. We call this a democratic experiment,
but I don't think we often return to the meaning
of that, like we're trying something. That's what an experiment is.
We're trying to live together, to labor and love together.
(14:24):
In in your words, what are some places, some examples
where you've been a part of community efforts to labor
and love together. Oh, I'm taken back to the aftermath
of the massacre in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in two thousand twelves,
(14:45):
white supremacist walks into a sick, gored water opens fire.
It's the largest attack on six in our history on
the soil, and it barely gets the kind of media
attention that other mass shootings get. And long after the
news media left, we stayed. We stayed to watch the
community grieve together and breathe together, and hold each other
(15:07):
in their rage and and invite their neighbors to grieve
with them. That memorial, I remember just looking into the
open caskets of people who look like my own aunts
and uncles, and I just lost it. And I looked
behind me, and there were thousands of people pouring through
(15:28):
those doors. Three thousand people came to grieve with us.
And what I've discovered is that grieving is frontline social
justice work. People who grieve together then organized together, And
so so many of those people who grieved with us
were the people who stood by our side as we
spent a year demanding that the government start tracking hate
(15:50):
crimes against our community, and we won. We changed federal
hate crimes policy. We won. So I think about all
the grieving that's happening now in this eats since George
Floyd's murder and how in our grief, in our bravery,
in our grief, we are building relationships and birthing revolutions
that will actually and are actually dismantling and reimagining institutions
(16:14):
of power in this country. UM, thank you for that,
because again I'm learning with you as I listen. I'm
also my listener, and I think the idea that action
in a democracy, you know, civic engagement, these words which
are so unemotional in most cases, they feel like they
(16:35):
require kind of explicit policy or political intent or execution.
And what you just described is very human, active empathy
to grieve with a community, even maybe especially if you're
not a member of that community, to show up for
someone else in numbers as a prelude to what's the
(17:00):
US to look like the word organizing, but it sounds
like it's a helpful, if not necessary, precondition. And that's
the work that we are doing about reclaiming love as
a force for justice. That grieving together is revolutionary love,
and holding each other in our rage is revolutionary love,
and listening to each other is revolutionary love. And reimagining
(17:21):
the country together as revolutionary love, as well as the
big acts of policy demand that you are naming that
all of that is part of an ecosystem of a
healthy movement, of vibrant movement that's grounded in the ethic
of love. Yeah, I want to get your thoughts on power.
You drop that word awhile back. It often feels like
(17:41):
something we are subject to the powers that be, concentrations
of power acting upon the rest of us, and we're
just sort of passengers and the power mobile maybe being
run over by that power mobile. How do you envision
conceive of power, especially with respect to the work that
(18:03):
you're up to in the movements you've been a part of. Well,
there's different forms of power, right The kinds of power
you are naming is political power, power of the state,
power to divide, to oppressed, to crush. But when I
think about my black sisters and brothers, siblings in my
life who inspire me most, they are powerful in their resilience,
(18:24):
they are powerful in their wisdom, they are powerful in
their ability to love beyond limit. And so I think
it's helpful then to think about how we as a
generation are called to live into and untapped that kind
(18:48):
of power to reimagine the country. And we're seeing it.
You know, do you remember Bartenda. After this president took power,
it was all about resistance. Yeah, hashtags, yeah, like T
shirts like we were the resistance, and I was proud
of us. I thought it was bold and necessary for
our survival. But I was so deeply worried because we
(19:09):
were always going to be trapped in in US and
them and an adversarial relationship that put them in power,
you know, and kept us power less if you were
just resisting. And what I'm so inspired by now is
that we are moving from resistance to reimagining, reimagining every
institution on the face of this country, not just policing
(19:32):
and public safety and criminal justice, but our economies are
in the small institutions in our lives, are our families,
our workplaces are industries, are houses of worship. I think
about how all of the great social reformers in history,
and I'm gonna read just a piece of this book
to you, they did more than just resist a few
(19:54):
bad actors. They held up a vision of the world
as it ought to be, nonax saying it, Mohammed led it,
Jesus taught it, but the envisioned it. King dreamt it,
Dorothy Day labored for it. Mandela lived it. Gandhi died
for it. Grace Lee bogs fought for it for seven decades.
(20:16):
They call for us not just to unseat bad actors,
but to reimagine the institutions of power that ordered the world.
Any social harm can betraced institutions that produce it, authorize it,
or otherwise profit from it. To undo the injustice, we
have to imagine new institutions and step in to lead them.
(20:38):
That act of reimagining institutions sounds big when I when
I hear names like Gandhi and Grace Lee Boggs and King,
and like those are big people, their big names. They
led folks, They walked into the firing line, sometimes almost literally.
What is the person who is unknown to most of
(20:59):
us to do in the act of reimagining? What is
the role of the un celebrity of the citizen in
this reimagining? That is so important? Isn't that what you're
doing with this podcast. Isn't this a container for all
of us to hear voices and stories how to reimagine
(21:22):
the country, reimagine the world and our tiny piece of it.
All of us have a sphere of influence, a community
within reach that we can labor inside and help transition.
I'm going to read one more piece of this because
i feel like it's something that I had to remind
myself of when I feel so overwhelmed and I feel
(21:44):
like I am not enough. Remember the stars of my
childhood and the country I could look up and see
the stars. I had forgotten the stars after so many
years of activism. I had forgotten to look up. The
stars burning so strong and long that their light reaches
us long after they have died. Isn't that what our
lives and our activism should look like. Not the supernova
(22:06):
a single outburst under pressure. We must be the long
burning star right and study, contained and sustained for our
energy to reach the next generation long after we die.
Oh and to be part of a constellation. Let us
see ourselves as part of a larger picture, even if
we are like the second star on Orion's belt or
(22:26):
the seventh of the Seven Sisters. For there is no
greater gift than to be part of a movement larger
than ourselves. That means that we only need to be
responsible for our own small patch of sky, our specific
area of influence. We need only to shine our particular
point of light, long and steady to become part of
(22:48):
stories sewn into the heaven. That's beautiful. Can you just
read the whole whole book to us. We can do
it in chapters, we can do it in installments, or
were ever works out for you for you? Um that
the vision of each of us as a star, first
of all, that's dope because we're all stars, um, and
(23:09):
the constellation that the night sky is not about one star, right,
It's about the collection of stars which paint this beautiful picture.
And we're in this sort of cosmic concert together. So
I like that being a source of light isn't just
something we look to the sun for the sun is
merely a star. Um. So for anyone who feels like
(23:32):
I'm not gandhi like that's you don't have to set
that bar. You're a star to The word citizen is
something that I, UM wasn't certain I wanted to put
in the title of this show because of its negative meaning,
because there are people who have that legal status and
people who don't, and I didn't want to send that signal,
(23:56):
draw that line in the sand. Well, this is only
for people with a social Security number of the right paperwork,
and I had to step back from that and say, no,
this is we're going to reclaim, We're going to reimagine. Right,
that was that was the point. Yes, what do you
make of the word citizen, um, in the context of
the work in your life, in the context of your
(24:17):
famili's century long history in this country, or maybe that
legal status wasn't always available um and we have the
current battles over who deserves to be seen as a
person with citizen kind of hanging in the balance. Oh,
that words citizen. I have struggled over the word precisely
(24:38):
because it was something that was denied to my family
for so long, and now that we have it. I
always thought, in the words of Hannah Rent, that the
citizenship was that thin membrane to protect us from state violence.
And now even that is not enough, especially if you're
sick or Muslim in this country. Thinking about all that
we have suffered in the form of national security policies
(24:59):
sin Stine eleven, and that is alongside our Latin ex
brothers and sisters and siblings are other indigenous folks. I
mean that the word citizen is not the kind of
protective label that we thought it was. That I thought
it was, And so I like what you're doing, brother,
I like what you're doing. You're you're reclaiming it, and
(25:20):
you're reimagining it, you're infusing it with new meanings, so
that it's no longer about a legal status, but about
a set of responsibilities and a set of callings for
how to show up in the world with bravery and
with integrity and with dignity, and for you to say no,
all of us, all of us can become. All of
us are citizens. And and to citizen is a verb,
(25:44):
it's an action that we take. I and my offering
is like, I believe that we citizen through revolutionary love.
I believe that showing up with the revolutionary love is
how to citizen. There's a part of your work and
(26:06):
a part of this whole project, this experiment of living
in community with others. That is very challenging when the
others with whom we live are a challenge to us,
when we do not see eye to eye, when they
are fighting tooth and nail to maybe deny and us
some dignity, some resource, some livelihood. And we're living in
(26:32):
a time right now have great division in our experiment.
It's always been divided the United States of America never
fully united, but now it feels pressing. And there's things
that you call for in your work that have to
do with listening, to engaging with acknowledging those who we
might think of as enemies. I think you call them opponents.
(26:53):
I'd love to hear about that. The community is not
all like minded, and so the role of and the
way to engage with those who are differently minded while
not giving up the integrity of our own right to
be feels like a very important and potentially difficult path
(27:13):
to walk. What are your thoughts, Oh, it's so difficult.
It's the hardest part. If I'm seeing no stranger, how
do I look into the faces of people who disgust me,
who I want to hate, and see them as a
part of me? I do not yet know. I mean,
what does it mean to love them? The audacity to
ask that? And when I think about what you're doing
(27:36):
with the words citizen, you have to be citizens and
you have to citizens in community right So too, I
believe that we as citizens all have different roles in
the labor for justice at different times. So if you
are someone right now who has a knee on your neck,
like so many black people and brown people do right now.
It is not necessarily your role to look up at
(27:57):
your oppressor and wonder about him, listen to him, or
even try to love him. You know, your job is
to stay alive. Your job is to take the next breath.
Your job is to survive. That is your revolutionary act.
But if you are someone, by virtue of your white
skin or whatever privilege you wield, who is safe enough
and brave enough to sit with those kinds of opponents,
(28:20):
then perhaps it is your role to tend to their wounds.
Because what we know to be true is that no
matter who is elected on on election Day in November,
all those disaffected wife folks out there, they're still gonna
be around the next day. So what do we do
with them? And this book is filled with stories of
times when I have sat with white supremacists. I have
(28:41):
sat with prison guards and soldiers. I've sat with former abusers,
And every time I want to leave, I stay right.
It's a discipline to stay and keep listening and beneath
their slogans and sound bites, I start to hear their
story and then I start to see their pain. I
start to see their wound. See, I have learned that
(29:03):
there are no such thing as monsters in this world.
There are only human beings who are wounded, who who
do what they do out of their own sense of
insecurity or anxiety, or greed or blindness, And their participation
and oppression comes at a cost. It cuts them off
from their own capacity to love. So the thing about
this Barton Day revolutionary love is to labor for others,
(29:26):
our opponents, and ourselves. It is not just moral, It
is strategic. It is pragmatic because once I gain information,
ha ha, there we go. I knew there was a hook.
I'm like, wait for it, wait for it. Here it comes. Yes,
tell me about the strategy of this. The strategy is like,
I need to know what you're listening to, what radio programs,
(29:48):
who's putting the guns in your hands, what institutions are
radicalizing you are authorizing you to hurt us? And then
I can be so much more smart about our strategies
for campaigning for change. I mean, our goal then is
not just to unseat a few bad apples, a few
bad police officers, or even to unseat this president. I mean,
we need to do that, but I'm more interested in
changing the conditions that put them into office in the
(30:10):
first place. I'm more interested in dismantling and or reimagining
the institutions of power that harm all of us. I mean,
our suffering is not equal. But those who hold the
keys to ourselves, who are trained whore training their eyes
to see us as animals, that too takes the cost.
And so what does it mean to hold up a
(30:31):
vision that liberates all of us? That that is our
revolutionary intervention? I thank you for that. The strategy got me,
and I think that there was purpose to it. It
isn't just self flagellation. Look how much I can suffer.
Look how novel I am to walk into the lions den.
(30:53):
There's lions, and you know what I mean. So it's
like understanding I'm gonna run this lion metaphor too far,
Understanding what the lions eat, understanding why they look at
you the way they do, what their needs are. And
I think, you know, the way you just described some
of these individuals that you've interacted with with their wounds,
(31:14):
You're in a relationship with them. And I think that
in a collective sense, we're in a relationship with our nation,
and our nation has wounds right, and it has traumas
in its past, and it has pain, And for us
to not merely condemn, but seek to wonder about and
understand this place that we have a right to that
if we're here, we have a right to it, papers
(31:35):
are not. We've contributed something that we can apply some
of those same metaphors and same lessons to that collective
relationship as well as our individual ones in our lives. Yes,
that's it. And I always say that we need all
three kinds of practices of love, for love to be revolutionaries,
for so loving just our opponents that is self loathing,
(31:58):
loving just ourselves that is escapism, and loving just others
that's ineffective. And too many of our movements have been there.
And I am really proud of the deep bonds of
solidarity that we are seeing and how people are are
loving each other and our movements for justice. But how
many young activists are dying early or taking their lives
(32:20):
or getting sick or opting out. We're not building enough
spaces to help each other, love ourselves, to love our
own flesh and blood so that we will last. And
then how many of us are tempted to mirror the
kind of victual that we are fighting. We cannot become
what we are fighting against. So this ethic of love,
you know, to hold each other in community, and to
start to practice and cultivate love for ourselves, even for
(32:42):
our opponents and others, that I think is how we
can sustain each other in a way that we can
last with integrity, with our souls intact. Well, I mean,
I definitely want my soul to be intact. I don't
even know that was on the line. Thank you's on line.
You just raised the bar ourselves, opponents and others. Three
oh s. I like that You've kind of designed this
(33:03):
whole thing. There's a piece, Go ahead, sorry, I add,
I mean this is this is why I draw heavily
from black thinkers in this book, heavily from Bell Hooks
and Audrey lord Um and Tony Morrison. I shall permit
no man, no matter what his color might be, to
narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him,
said book or T. Washington Tony Morrison. Hate does that
(33:25):
burns off everything but itself. So whatever your grievance is,
your face looks just like your enemies. I choose to
love my opponents I choose to see their humanity in
order to preserve my own. Laboring to love my opponents
is also how I love myself. This is not the
stuff of saintliness. This is our birthright. If we if
(33:47):
we do this work of love, radical revolutionary, and we
do it in community, what do we risk if we
don't focus on the self, on the work that we
have to do inside? What? What do you think happens
if we have this sort of imbalanced approach. I think
by your own definition of the whole approach, we lose everything,
(34:09):
don't we. I don't know. Bartune day, when this president
took power and I was putting my son to sleep
at night, there was a voice in my head that
was like, I can't I can't live in this world.
I'm not strong enough. I had. I had pushed for
so long and so hard, and ground my own bones
(34:32):
to the ground, and thought that serving meant I had
to suffer and keep myself suffering. That I had forgotten
that my own life, that my own body was beloved
and worth fighting for. And it took this year in
the rainforest for me to really begin to understand that
we can't last if we're not loving ourselves, and I
(34:56):
don't call it self love when you are barely hanging
on by a threat. It's not your job then to
love yourself. You know you need to. You need community
to help you love. Like we don't give birth alone,
we don't go to battle alone. Like in any long labor,
including the labor of keeping ourselves healthy and alive and well,
we need each other. We depend on each other. So
cultivating communities of care where we are taking seriously are
(35:19):
our own precious lives. I worry sometimes about this incredible, energetic,
new rising generation. I see myself in them. I remember
what it was like to get arrested for the first time,
and you know, to speak truth to power holding a
megaphone in the streets. And and I also just wanted
to tell him, oh, breathe, my love, this is going
(35:41):
to be one long labor. Are you sleeping enough, are
you drinking enough water? Are you breathing? Who is going
to have your back? And how will you remember to
love yourself well enough so in twenty years you can last,
So you don't have that voice in your head like
I had in mind. I could spend five hours with you.
I will not, but I think I have two more
(36:01):
thoughts slash questions. So much of what the focus of
our civic energy right now in the US is is
about this president, as it was eight years ago with
the last presidential transition. We just get rid of this president,
we will solve things, or we hate so much because
(36:23):
there is so much to hate about the actions and
the cruelty done in our name through this administration. Do
you have any concern that we have in focusing on
this president actually given this person too much power? Oh?
Of course, I even thought that this president was an aberration,
(36:43):
that if we just could remove him, it would all
be okay again. But we know that normal was never
okay for black and brown and Indigenous people. And it
took me going to the rainforest and really seeing my
country from the outside of it for me to really
wreck it. And with genocide and slavery. I mean that
(37:05):
farmland that I grew up on, that was my own,
that I belonged to, There is blood in that land.
Just a few decades ago, the largest, most documented genocide
of Native peoples took place in California, and a few
decades later, my grandfather arrived as if those people were
never there and we were complicit, right, And so if
(37:28):
we take indigenous people's memories as a true starting point
of the history of the America's then this presidency is
not an aberration. It is a continuation of what helped
found this country, of the white supremacist violence that has
built this country through slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, mass incarceration
now and so, so once we understand that, once we
(37:51):
see this president as simply a symptom, I mean, the
ugliest form of that symptom, so vivid, so in front
of our faces every day. But if we just remove him,
all of the institutions that were founded on those beliefs,
all of the cultural norms that that moved through him
and his body and breath, right like, those don't go away,
and all of his supporters don't either. So what we're
(38:13):
talking about is a much longer transition. And this is
the timeline. I know we're looking to November, and it
doesn't matter. I mean, I really do want to unseat
this president because then we give ourselves a chance to
labor for our nation instead of just being in crisis
response mode. And that's what too many of us did
right under Obomber. Like it's done we went home, and
it's like no, no, Actually, the window opens, the labor begins, begins,
(38:37):
because this moment that we are in, we are in
a much larger transition moment. Within twenty five years, the
number of people of color will exceed the number of
white people for the first time since colonization. So, yes,
we are at a crossroads. Will we continue to descend
into a kind of civil war, a power struggle with
people who want to return America to a past where
(38:58):
certain class of white people hold power, or will we
begin to birth a nation that has never been on
the face of this planet, a nation made up of
other nations, a nation that is truly multiracial, multi faith, multicultural,
where we see no stranger. Those are the stakes. And
(39:19):
when with climate change, you know what time is running out? Yeah? Yeah,
what we do what our generation does not just between
now and November, but past November. Oh, it matters. It
matters not only for the future of our country. How
we citizen matters for the future of the earth and
for the future of humanity. I literally couldn't have said
it better myself. Now. Normally, when you got a show
(39:41):
called How to Citizen with Baritun Day and your guests
says something that powerful. You cut the interview. It's over.
That's a wrap. But I couldn't let it go at that.
Valerie said one more thing that I think you need
to hear. So check out what she did and learned
(40:02):
about herself on election night. On election night, I keep
going back there because we're about to experience another election night.
Right as the results came in, I remember, you know, horror,
seizing my my body and my hand on my mouth,
and my son, who was almost two at the time,
(40:25):
tugged my sleeve and said, dance time, mommy. And I
looked at my husband saying, not tonight, I mean, how
the last thing. And my husband looked at me and
he just shrugs, you know, and he says, your rules,
you said every night, looks I like to lay the rules. Okay.
So we turned down the music and in the first beginning,
(40:45):
oh my god, barre to me. I was so miserable.
I was just weighing back and forth. I just felt
like I was a zombie, so dead. And my son,
you know, baby, your fire, your work, and he leaps
into my arms and suddenly he's like, throw me up, mommy.
Boom boom, boom, even writers on the room set them up,
and he's squealing and he's laughing, and suddenly I'm laughing
(41:08):
and he's dancing and I'm dancing, and baritune day we
were dancing on election night. I mean, I just anyone
who may have like seen into your home from a distance,
I can imagine what they're thinking, which is like, those
are not the people I would have thought celebrating tonight,
But hey, is America's that's right. Afterwards, I felt this
(41:33):
energy rising up in my body which I can only
describe as as joy. And I thought, oh, in the
sick faith, it's called nicola ever rising spirits, even in
the darkness, joyfulness, even in the labor. And I thought, oh,
joy is our greatest act of moral resistance. Joy returns
(41:55):
us to everything that is good and beautiful and worth
fighting for, Joe. It will give us energy in this
long labor for justice. So how are you protecting your
joy every day? Yo? So you feel that too? Right?
That mind expansion, that heart expansion, that dopeness of Valerie Cower,
(42:21):
who I knew was powerful. That's why I booked her.
But yeoh, she blew me out the water. And I'm
still hearing her words. I'm hearing her say there are
no such things as monsters in this world, only human
beings who have been wounded. I'm hearing her say, love ourselves,
others and our opponents. I'm hearing her say, how we
(42:43):
citizen matters for the future of the earth and the
future of humanity. I mean, no pressure, new show. Wow.
We make this show for you, not just to listen to,
not just to watch, and we have video as well.
We make this show to give us all the to
practice how to citizen, to turn our outrage and our
(43:04):
energy into actions that were taken together on the topics
we explore in this series, we'll have an impact on
our communities. Like I said at the beginning of this show,
how the citizen at its core is about relationships with
ourselves and with others. So in each episode, we're going
to share things you can do internally and externally to
(43:25):
strengthen your citizen practice. When I call it a citizen practice,
it reminds me of my older sister Belinda and her
yoga studio and her yoga practice. So this is for you.
This for this episode, here's what you can do. We've
adapted something straight out of Valorie's book see No Stranger.
It's a writing exercise and we want you to spend
(43:48):
fifteen minutes on it to reflect internally on these five prompts. Now,
this reflection is about the journey, not the destination. This
is not about having the right answers or the shortest
one word answers that are going to assure you a
great grade. We're not grading. Spend some time, breathe into
(44:09):
this and push out the answers that feel most true
for you. Laying this kind of foundation is going to
be important later as we start taking actions focused a
bit more on external relationships with others. So the five prompts.
Number one, what is your superpower in our fight to
(44:29):
make society better for us all? Is it your voice?
Is your depen? Is it a bank account? Number two?
What protects you and who has your back when things
get tough? Number three? Who is your beloved community, your
revolutionary pocket, the group of people you connect most with,
the group that will show up when things get tough.
(44:51):
Number four? What object or activity will ground and center
you and remind you of who you are? Number five?
Where do you find joy? And what are you going
to do every day? To protect that joy. We would
love to hear, see, or just read your reflections to
any or all of these questions. Email us old school
(45:15):
action at how to citizen dot com. Help us out
by mentioning episode zero or prelude in the subject line.
We are so grateful to Valerie Coward for helping us
give birth to this show. Please check out her Revolutionary
Love Project dot com or dive into her book and
curriculum at See No Stranger dot com and follow her
(45:38):
on Twitter at Valerie Cower V A L A R
I E K A. You are and if you like
what you experienced here, please share this show. Leave review
five stars is my humble suggestion, and sign up from
my newsletter at baritunda dot com, where I will announce
(45:59):
the upcoming live tapings and more from audience members like you.
You can even send me a text to two O
two eight nine four eight four four let me know
you found me by just putting the word citizens, so
I know where you came from and I'll send you
updates that way as well. How do Citizen with barrattun
Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts, Executive
(46:22):
produced by Nick Stump, Miles Gray Elizabeth Stewart and barrattun
Day Thirsty, Produced by Joel Smith, Edited by Justin Smith,
Power by You,
This is How to Citizen with Baritune Day, a show
where we reimagine the word citizen, reclaim it from those
who weaponized it, and remind us all of our collective power.
We have a definition of this civic power which is
broad and goes far beyond the purely political. This show
is not how a bill becomes a law. This show
(00:24):
is about power and who has the power to determine
the quality of our lives. We believe the correct answer
is all of us. Welcome to our very first episode,
Pray Revolutionary Love is How to Citizen. I'm Baritune Day.
(00:44):
I've been working on this show for years. I've been
dreaming of seeing or hearing something like it for most
of my adult life, and at this present time it
feels urgent. We are in an intense moment of history,
of pandemic, of revolution, of way too many straining services.
Am I right? Our democracy is at a tipping point?
(01:08):
But which way it tips? That's up to us. We're
making this show to help tip it in the direction
of more justice and more power for more people. And yeah,
I said, this is episode zero. See what had happened? Was?
Our plan for episode one involved two guests but then
we heard that first guest in that conversation, or should
(01:31):
I say our zero guest. We heard her words and
we knew we needed to give them an entire episode
so they could breathe, so you could breathe with them,
because she's so eloquently expressed the spiritual core of what
we're all about. We have long felt that the concept
of how to citizen it's really about our relationship with
(01:54):
each other, but also our relationship with ourselves. And in
order to truly be in community with each other, to
show up for one another, we have to show up
for ourselves, and that may involve examining who we are,
examining our relationship with ourselves first. This episode's guest is
(02:16):
the perfect person to help us in that project because
she has a definition of citizenship that includes more than
external actions in the world out there. She conceives of
a role with internal changes we must make to our
minds and to our hearts. I think of this episode
as the spiritual invocation of the project we're about to
(02:38):
embark on. So check out my conversation with Valerie Kaer.
Stay until the end, because we're gonna give you some
things you can do and welcome to the show, citizen.
I'm holding the book of my very refers guests, Valerie
(03:01):
Cower right here see No Stranger, a memoir and manifesto
Revolutionary Love. And when I look at the back cover,
it's got a long list. Valerie, got a long list
of dope commas separated value uh to represent some of
your contributions to this world. Civil rights activist, lawyer, filmmaker, innovator,
(03:23):
founder of the Revolutionary Love Project. But I'm gonna give
a long winded intro, and I bear some patience with me, Valerie,
because I think I need to do this. I think
our listeners need to hear this, and I want you
to hear it. In November of I woke up after
that election, having watched that election with a group of
about ten people, only two of whom had all four
(03:44):
parents born in the United States of America. We were
a witnessing of immigrants to our minds and hears tragic
moment in US history. Roughly a month after that, I'm
hanging out on Facebook. We're only bad things have it
as far as I was concerned at that time, like
that's where bad news comes to hunt you down. That's
(04:04):
where Russians interfere with the election. And I saw you,
I saw you say these words that spoke so true. Uh,
that said, what if this darkness that we're feeling that
we're in is not the darkness of the tomb, but
the darkness of the womb. And this isn't the death
of our country, this is the birth. And that really
(04:28):
moved me, and it still moves me to even say it,
to be able to say it to you. And then
a few months later I met you and I screamed
from across the crowded room like some film scene, that's
the woman who moved me with such poetry because it
has felt like such a dark time. That day felt dark,
but we've been in years of what has seemed to
(04:50):
be like darkness. So I say that as a setup. One,
thank you very much for that moment and for being
a light in darkness to help draw so many of
us out of that. Two. Welcome to how to citizens.
It's good to have you. That is a welcome, sir.
(05:12):
Thank you, brother, You're very welcome. Thank you. Can I
say you can say that's why you're here? Please say
that question? Is this the darkness of the tomb? Or
is this the darkness of the womb. It is the
question I have been asking myself every day, and I
think it's both. I think it's both. When you know
(05:35):
almost a hundred and fifty thousand people have been killed
by this virus, the scale and scope of which was
preventable if we had real leadership, disproportionately people of color.
When we see George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, Race, Shard Brooks,
all those that we have lost that we will never
be able to get back, it feels as though death
has one and there's also a bit of dying of
(05:58):
the notion of the nation that we thought we were.
And yet we're also seeing millions of people flood city
streets in their grief, in their rage, rising up, breathing together,
reimagining together in a revolutionary moment for black lives and
racial justice that frankly, I never thought I would see
in my lifetime. And when we see, you know, a
(06:21):
wall of white people in front of black people, kneeling
in the street, in front of an army of police officers,
these are images we didn't see or two, and so
I keep thinking, am I seeing glimpses? Are we seeing glimpses?
Of the America that is longing to be so yeah,
breathe and push. Just breathe and breathe and push. You
(06:45):
have acknowledged, built on, borrowed from a number of traditions
in your work, Valerie. You are a lawyer. You have
a degree in law, you have a degree in divinity,
you have a degree of bachelor's arts from a lot
of institutions, are very credentialed. The thing that I'm actually
most curious about it came very early in your books,
you know, Stranger. You wrote, I grew up on forty
(07:09):
acres in Clovis, California, and I want to know did
you have a mule as well? Like did you have
forty acres and the mule, because I'm just I'm still
looking for that. And I was like, we didn't even
have a cow. My dad got the cow, but I
(07:29):
just got strawberries. And yeah, my my family has lived
and farmed in California for more than a century. And
so I grew up with such a deep connection to
this land, to this soil. And I was raised with
my grandparents, so I still grew up with the stories
and the scriptures and the songs of my sick faith
(07:50):
and so that was my orientation to the world. And
you know, it wasn't severed, of course, until I experienced
my first racial slur, like so many of us young
kids of color. And I feel like my whole life
has been a journey of returning to feeling at home
in my body, at home in the world. The project
(08:12):
that we are embarking on, not just as a podcast
but as a society. You know, it feels like we
have this moment, we're at this tipping point, and which
way we tip is not a foregone conclusion. It's not
guaranteed to be great, but it's also not guaranteed to
be devastating. So tomb or womb feels like it's up
to us. Yes, you just said in my body. And
(08:35):
I think there's a lot of this work which feels
very external. It's about giving money to organizations. It is
about getting to know our neighbors, you know, as real people,
and supporting folks on the ground doing work, and re
engaging with our democracy, with our bodies out there. But
what do you think, and you might have some thoughts
(08:56):
on the internal work. What is the body of each
of us? How do we get in touch with that?
What is the role of that, I think in this
act of citizenship of power to the people. Yes, Naco
Betty nahibgana Naco Betty nehi Beganna, I see no enemy,
I see no stranger. These were the words of God Noni,
(09:20):
the founder of the Sick Faith. And really he was
just lifting up a call to love that has been
on the lips of Indigenous leaders and spiritual teachers and
social reformers for so many centuries. And this is not
about a belief that we hold in our head. I mean,
anti racism is in the air, and so many good
people are holding it as an idea in their minds,
like trying to be anti racist, trying to be and
(09:42):
actually it doesn't work. To be truly anti racist is
to orient to the world in a new way. And
so I'm inviting people into thinking about what it means
to see no stranger. George Floyd, brother, Brianna Taylor, sister,
their children, our children. When we see no stranger, when
we are brave enough to see no stranger, than it
(10:04):
must mean being brave enough to let their grief into
our own hearts and to fight for them when they
are in harm's way. So revolutionary love is when we
are brave enough to see no strangers, not out there
and not in here. And for so many people of color,
we live in a culture that wants to make us
strange to ourselves, that wants to sever us from our
(10:25):
own inner knowing. And so the book See No Stranger
is about what it means to practice love, to labor
and love for others, even for opponents, and for ourselves.
It's a way of moving through the world that is
both personal and political, and it's how we last. I
I really, brother, You talked about leaving the country, you know,
not by choice. I actually left the country by choice
(10:47):
for the election. Right. I was so breathless. People were saying, well,
how do we breathe? How do we push? And I said,
I don't know. I know in here, but I don't
know out here. And so I was given a gift
that very few women who are mothers and activists are
ever a given. It was given time off and a
room of my own, and I went to a rainforest
in Central America with my family, and I took my
(11:07):
first deep breath, and I had taken in so many years, really,
since nine eleven, since I had become an activist, and
I poured through the stories of my life, and through
the stories of social movements in the past, and through
our wisdom traditions, and I began to see patterns which
I came to call practices of revolutionary love. And so
I wrote this book for my own survival, so that
(11:28):
I could come back to the country and last. I
believe when we labor in love, it's how we last.
And I want to last. I want to grow old.
I want to grow old with you. You mentioned September eleven,
(11:50):
two thousand one, as a moment of the birth of
your own activism. What does that event and the consequences
of it, What does that meant for you? Oh, it
was a new era for us, for all of us,
but especially for those of us who are Muslim or sick.
In the wake of the horror of those attacks, we
know that hate violence, you know, erupted across city streets.
And the first person killed and I hate crime after
(12:12):
nine eleven was biber sing Sodi, a man I knew,
a sick, turbaned father who I called uncle. So this
was before social media, This was before we had any
channels any ways to tell our own stories. Right, We
barely had email. There were just list serves where people
are saying, my father has been shot, my brother has
been beaten. Helped us, someone save us. And I was
(12:34):
a twenty year old college kid. I had an old camera.
I got in my car, I drove across the country
and began capturing these stories of my community. And that
was the beginning of my life as an activist. And
you know, back then, Bartunday, we we thought that, we
even called it the backlash. You know, we thought it
was going to be this narrow, finite era in history
(12:56):
that we would look back on, and the back flash
never end. It. We're almost twenty years later, and sick
and Muslim Americans are five times more likely to be
targets of hate than we were before nine eleven. And
with every film, with every lawsuit, with every campaign, I
thought we were making the nation safer for the next generation.
And then this president takes power, hate crimes skyrocket once again,
(13:16):
rivaling what we saw after nine eleven. And now I'm
a new mother, and I thought, oh my god, my
son is being raised in a country more dangerous for
him than it was for me or even for my grandfather,
who arrived a hundred years ago. How am I going
to last? So the labor for justice? And black people
know this, You know I came to this late. Right,
you all noticed that the labor for justice is long
(13:38):
and hard, and it may go on after we leave
this earth. And so how do we last? How do
we labor in love so the labor itself becomes an
end in itself, that the labor becomes joyful. I believe
that laboring for justice with with joy is the meaning
of life. You you use a phrase days in the
(14:00):
book that I have tried to use to describe this
show that I've seen others doing similar work do, which
is living in community. We're inside of an experiment, right,
We're in a petriot dish. We call this a democratic experiment,
but I don't think we often return to the meaning
of that, like we're trying something. That's what an experiment is.
We're trying to live together, to labor and love together.
(14:24):
In in your words, what are some places, some examples
where you've been a part of community efforts to labor
and love together. Oh, I'm taken back to the aftermath
of the massacre in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in two thousand twelves,
(14:45):
white supremacist walks into a sick, gored water opens fire.
It's the largest attack on six in our history on
the soil, and it barely gets the kind of media
attention that other mass shootings get. And long after the
news media left, we stayed. We stayed to watch the
community grieve together and breathe together, and hold each other
(15:07):
in their rage and and invite their neighbors to grieve
with them. That memorial, I remember just looking into the
open caskets of people who look like my own aunts
and uncles, and I just lost it. And I looked
behind me, and there were thousands of people pouring through
(15:28):
those doors. Three thousand people came to grieve with us.
And what I've discovered is that grieving is frontline social
justice work. People who grieve together then organized together, And
so so many of those people who grieved with us
were the people who stood by our side as we
spent a year demanding that the government start tracking hate
(15:50):
crimes against our community, and we won. We changed federal
hate crimes policy. We won. So I think about all
the grieving that's happening now in this eats since George
Floyd's murder and how in our grief, in our bravery,
in our grief, we are building relationships and birthing revolutions
that will actually and are actually dismantling and reimagining institutions
(16:14):
of power in this country. UM, thank you for that,
because again I'm learning with you as I listen. I'm
also my listener, and I think the idea that action
in a democracy, you know, civic engagement, these words which
are so unemotional in most cases, they feel like they
(16:35):
require kind of explicit policy or political intent or execution.
And what you just described is very human, active empathy
to grieve with a community, even maybe especially if you're
not a member of that community, to show up for
someone else in numbers as a prelude to what's the
(17:00):
US to look like the word organizing, but it sounds
like it's a helpful, if not necessary, precondition. And that's
the work that we are doing about reclaiming love as
a force for justice. That grieving together is revolutionary love,
and holding each other in our rage is revolutionary love,
and listening to each other is revolutionary love. And reimagining
(17:21):
the country together as revolutionary love, as well as the
big acts of policy demand that you are naming that
all of that is part of an ecosystem of a
healthy movement, of vibrant movement that's grounded in the ethic
of love. Yeah, I want to get your thoughts on power.
You drop that word awhile back. It often feels like
(17:41):
something we are subject to the powers that be, concentrations
of power acting upon the rest of us, and we're
just sort of passengers and the power mobile maybe being
run over by that power mobile. How do you envision
conceive of power, especially with respect to the work that
(18:03):
you're up to in the movements you've been a part of. Well,
there's different forms of power, right The kinds of power
you are naming is political power, power of the state,
power to divide, to oppressed, to crush. But when I
think about my black sisters and brothers, siblings in my
life who inspire me most, they are powerful in their resilience,
(18:24):
they are powerful in their wisdom, they are powerful in
their ability to love beyond limit. And so I think
it's helpful then to think about how we as a
generation are called to live into and untapped that kind
(18:48):
of power to reimagine the country. And we're seeing it.
You know, do you remember Bartenda. After this president took power,
it was all about resistance. Yeah, hashtags, yeah, like T
shirts like we were the resistance, and I was proud
of us. I thought it was bold and necessary for
our survival. But I was so deeply worried because we
(19:09):
were always going to be trapped in in US and
them and an adversarial relationship that put them in power,
you know, and kept us power less if you were
just resisting. And what I'm so inspired by now is
that we are moving from resistance to reimagining, reimagining every
institution on the face of this country, not just policing
(19:32):
and public safety and criminal justice, but our economies are
in the small institutions in our lives, are our families,
our workplaces are industries, are houses of worship. I think
about how all of the great social reformers in history,
and I'm gonna read just a piece of this book
to you, they did more than just resist a few
(19:54):
bad actors. They held up a vision of the world
as it ought to be, nonax saying it, Mohammed led it,
Jesus taught it, but the envisioned it. King dreamt it,
Dorothy Day labored for it. Mandela lived it. Gandhi died
for it. Grace Lee bogs fought for it for seven decades.
(20:16):
They call for us not just to unseat bad actors,
but to reimagine the institutions of power that ordered the world.
Any social harm can betraced institutions that produce it, authorize it,
or otherwise profit from it. To undo the injustice, we
have to imagine new institutions and step in to lead them.
(20:38):
That act of reimagining institutions sounds big when I when
I hear names like Gandhi and Grace Lee Boggs and King,
and like those are big people, their big names. They
led folks, They walked into the firing line, sometimes almost literally.
What is the person who is unknown to most of
(20:59):
us to do in the act of reimagining? What is
the role of the un celebrity of the citizen in
this reimagining? That is so important? Isn't that what you're
doing with this podcast. Isn't this a container for all
of us to hear voices and stories how to reimagine
(21:22):
the country, reimagine the world and our tiny piece of it.
All of us have a sphere of influence, a community
within reach that we can labor inside and help transition.
I'm going to read one more piece of this because
i feel like it's something that I had to remind
myself of when I feel so overwhelmed and I feel
(21:44):
like I am not enough. Remember the stars of my
childhood and the country I could look up and see
the stars. I had forgotten the stars after so many
years of activism. I had forgotten to look up. The
stars burning so strong and long that their light reaches
us long after they have died. Isn't that what our
lives and our activism should look like. Not the supernova
(22:06):
a single outburst under pressure. We must be the long
burning star right and study, contained and sustained for our
energy to reach the next generation long after we die.
Oh and to be part of a constellation. Let us
see ourselves as part of a larger picture, even if
we are like the second star on Orion's belt or
(22:26):
the seventh of the Seven Sisters. For there is no
greater gift than to be part of a movement larger
than ourselves. That means that we only need to be
responsible for our own small patch of sky, our specific
area of influence. We need only to shine our particular
point of light, long and steady to become part of
(22:48):
stories sewn into the heaven. That's beautiful. Can you just
read the whole whole book to us. We can do
it in chapters, we can do it in installments, or
were ever works out for you for you? Um that
the vision of each of us as a star, first
of all, that's dope because we're all stars, um, and
(23:09):
the constellation that the night sky is not about one star, right,
It's about the collection of stars which paint this beautiful picture.
And we're in this sort of cosmic concert together. So
I like that being a source of light isn't just
something we look to the sun for the sun is
merely a star. Um. So for anyone who feels like
(23:32):
I'm not gandhi like that's you don't have to set
that bar. You're a star to The word citizen is
something that I, UM wasn't certain I wanted to put
in the title of this show because of its negative meaning,
because there are people who have that legal status and
people who don't, and I didn't want to send that signal,
(23:56):
draw that line in the sand. Well, this is only
for people with a social Security number of the right paperwork,
and I had to step back from that and say, no,
this is we're going to reclaim, We're going to reimagine. Right,
that was that was the point. Yes, what do you
make of the word citizen, um, in the context of
the work in your life, in the context of your
(24:17):
famili's century long history in this country, or maybe that
legal status wasn't always available um and we have the
current battles over who deserves to be seen as a
person with citizen kind of hanging in the balance. Oh,
that words citizen. I have struggled over the word precisely
(24:38):
because it was something that was denied to my family
for so long, and now that we have it. I
always thought, in the words of Hannah Rent, that the
citizenship was that thin membrane to protect us from state violence.
And now even that is not enough, especially if you're
sick or Muslim in this country. Thinking about all that
we have suffered in the form of national security policies
(24:59):
sin Stine eleven, and that is alongside our Latin ex
brothers and sisters and siblings are other indigenous folks. I
mean that the word citizen is not the kind of
protective label that we thought it was. That I thought
it was, And so I like what you're doing, brother,
I like what you're doing. You're you're reclaiming it, and
(25:20):
you're reimagining it, you're infusing it with new meanings, so
that it's no longer about a legal status, but about
a set of responsibilities and a set of callings for
how to show up in the world with bravery and
with integrity and with dignity, and for you to say no,
all of us, all of us can become. All of
us are citizens. And and to citizen is a verb,
(25:44):
it's an action that we take. I and my offering
is like, I believe that we citizen through revolutionary love.
I believe that showing up with the revolutionary love is
how to citizen. There's a part of your work and
(26:06):
a part of this whole project, this experiment of living
in community with others. That is very challenging when the
others with whom we live are a challenge to us,
when we do not see eye to eye, when they
are fighting tooth and nail to maybe deny and us
some dignity, some resource, some livelihood. And we're living in
(26:32):
a time right now have great division in our experiment.
It's always been divided the United States of America never
fully united, but now it feels pressing. And there's things
that you call for in your work that have to
do with listening, to engaging with acknowledging those who we
might think of as enemies. I think you call them opponents.
(26:53):
I'd love to hear about that. The community is not
all like minded, and so the role of and the
way to engage with those who are differently minded while
not giving up the integrity of our own right to
be feels like a very important and potentially difficult path
(27:13):
to walk. What are your thoughts, Oh, it's so difficult.
It's the hardest part. If I'm seeing no stranger, how
do I look into the faces of people who disgust me,
who I want to hate, and see them as a
part of me? I do not yet know. I mean,
what does it mean to love them? The audacity to
ask that? And when I think about what you're doing
(27:36):
with the words citizen, you have to be citizens and
you have to citizens in community right So too, I
believe that we as citizens all have different roles in
the labor for justice at different times. So if you
are someone right now who has a knee on your neck,
like so many black people and brown people do right now.
It is not necessarily your role to look up at
(27:57):
your oppressor and wonder about him, listen to him, or
even try to love him. You know, your job is
to stay alive. Your job is to take the next breath.
Your job is to survive. That is your revolutionary act.
But if you are someone, by virtue of your white
skin or whatever privilege you wield, who is safe enough
and brave enough to sit with those kinds of opponents,
(28:20):
then perhaps it is your role to tend to their wounds.
Because what we know to be true is that no
matter who is elected on on election Day in November,
all those disaffected wife folks out there, they're still gonna
be around the next day. So what do we do
with them? And this book is filled with stories of
times when I have sat with white supremacists. I have
(28:41):
sat with prison guards and soldiers. I've sat with former abusers,
And every time I want to leave, I stay right.
It's a discipline to stay and keep listening and beneath
their slogans and sound bites, I start to hear their
story and then I start to see their pain. I
start to see their wound. See, I have learned that
(29:03):
there are no such thing as monsters in this world.
There are only human beings who are wounded, who who
do what they do out of their own sense of
insecurity or anxiety, or greed or blindness, And their participation
and oppression comes at a cost. It cuts them off
from their own capacity to love. So the thing about
this Barton Day revolutionary love is to labor for others,
(29:26):
our opponents, and ourselves. It is not just moral, It
is strategic. It is pragmatic because once I gain information,
ha ha, there we go. I knew there was a hook.
I'm like, wait for it, wait for it. Here it comes. Yes,
tell me about the strategy of this. The strategy is like,
I need to know what you're listening to, what radio programs,
(29:48):
who's putting the guns in your hands, what institutions are
radicalizing you are authorizing you to hurt us? And then
I can be so much more smart about our strategies
for campaigning for change. I mean, our goal then is
not just to unseat a few bad apples, a few
bad police officers, or even to unseat this president. I mean,
we need to do that, but I'm more interested in
changing the conditions that put them into office in the
(30:10):
first place. I'm more interested in dismantling and or reimagining
the institutions of power that harm all of us. I mean,
our suffering is not equal. But those who hold the
keys to ourselves, who are trained whore training their eyes
to see us as animals, that too takes the cost.
And so what does it mean to hold up a
(30:31):
vision that liberates all of us? That that is our
revolutionary intervention? I thank you for that. The strategy got me,
and I think that there was purpose to it. It
isn't just self flagellation. Look how much I can suffer.
Look how novel I am to walk into the lions den.
(30:53):
There's lions, and you know what I mean. So it's
like understanding I'm gonna run this lion metaphor too far,
Understanding what the lions eat, understanding why they look at
you the way they do, what their needs are. And
I think, you know, the way you just described some
of these individuals that you've interacted with with their wounds,
(31:14):
You're in a relationship with them. And I think that
in a collective sense, we're in a relationship with our nation,
and our nation has wounds right, and it has traumas
in its past, and it has pain, And for us
to not merely condemn, but seek to wonder about and
understand this place that we have a right to that
if we're here, we have a right to it, papers
(31:35):
are not. We've contributed something that we can apply some
of those same metaphors and same lessons to that collective
relationship as well as our individual ones in our lives. Yes,
that's it. And I always say that we need all
three kinds of practices of love, for love to be revolutionaries,
for so loving just our opponents that is self loathing,
(31:58):
loving just ourselves that is escapism, and loving just others
that's ineffective. And too many of our movements have been there.
And I am really proud of the deep bonds of
solidarity that we are seeing and how people are are
loving each other and our movements for justice. But how
many young activists are dying early or taking their lives
(32:20):
or getting sick or opting out. We're not building enough
spaces to help each other, love ourselves, to love our
own flesh and blood so that we will last. And
then how many of us are tempted to mirror the
kind of victual that we are fighting. We cannot become
what we are fighting against. So this ethic of love,
you know, to hold each other in community, and to
start to practice and cultivate love for ourselves, even for
(32:42):
our opponents and others, that I think is how we
can sustain each other in a way that we can
last with integrity, with our souls intact. Well, I mean,
I definitely want my soul to be intact. I don't
even know that was on the line. Thank you's on line.
You just raised the bar ourselves, opponents and others. Three
oh s. I like that You've kind of designed this
(33:03):
whole thing. There's a piece, Go ahead, sorry, I add,
I mean this is this is why I draw heavily
from black thinkers in this book, heavily from Bell Hooks
and Audrey lord Um and Tony Morrison. I shall permit
no man, no matter what his color might be, to
narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him,
said book or T. Washington Tony Morrison. Hate does that
(33:25):
burns off everything but itself. So whatever your grievance is,
your face looks just like your enemies. I choose to
love my opponents I choose to see their humanity in
order to preserve my own. Laboring to love my opponents
is also how I love myself. This is not the
stuff of saintliness. This is our birthright. If we if
(33:47):
we do this work of love, radical revolutionary, and we
do it in community, what do we risk if we
don't focus on the self, on the work that we
have to do inside? What? What do you think happens
if we have this sort of imbalanced approach. I think
by your own definition of the whole approach, we lose everything,
(34:09):
don't we. I don't know. Bartune day, when this president
took power and I was putting my son to sleep
at night, there was a voice in my head that
was like, I can't I can't live in this world.
I'm not strong enough. I had. I had pushed for
so long and so hard, and ground my own bones
(34:32):
to the ground, and thought that serving meant I had
to suffer and keep myself suffering. That I had forgotten
that my own life, that my own body was beloved
and worth fighting for. And it took this year in
the rainforest for me to really begin to understand that
we can't last if we're not loving ourselves, and I
(34:56):
don't call it self love when you are barely hanging
on by a threat. It's not your job then to
love yourself. You know you need to. You need community
to help you love. Like we don't give birth alone,
we don't go to battle alone. Like in any long labor,
including the labor of keeping ourselves healthy and alive and well,
we need each other. We depend on each other. So
cultivating communities of care where we are taking seriously are
(35:19):
our own precious lives. I worry sometimes about this incredible, energetic,
new rising generation. I see myself in them. I remember
what it was like to get arrested for the first time,
and you know, to speak truth to power holding a
megaphone in the streets. And and I also just wanted
to tell him, oh, breathe, my love, this is going
(35:41):
to be one long labor. Are you sleeping enough, are
you drinking enough water? Are you breathing? Who is going
to have your back? And how will you remember to
love yourself well enough so in twenty years you can last,
So you don't have that voice in your head like
I had in mind. I could spend five hours with you.
I will not, but I think I have two more
(36:01):
thoughts slash questions. So much of what the focus of
our civic energy right now in the US is is
about this president, as it was eight years ago with
the last presidential transition. We just get rid of this president,
we will solve things, or we hate so much because
(36:23):
there is so much to hate about the actions and
the cruelty done in our name through this administration. Do
you have any concern that we have in focusing on
this president actually given this person too much power? Oh?
Of course, I even thought that this president was an aberration,
(36:43):
that if we just could remove him, it would all
be okay again. But we know that normal was never
okay for black and brown and Indigenous people. And it
took me going to the rainforest and really seeing my
country from the outside of it for me to really
wreck it. And with genocide and slavery. I mean that
(37:05):
farmland that I grew up on, that was my own,
that I belonged to, There is blood in that land.
Just a few decades ago, the largest, most documented genocide
of Native peoples took place in California, and a few
decades later, my grandfather arrived as if those people were
never there and we were complicit, right, And so if
(37:28):
we take indigenous people's memories as a true starting point
of the history of the America's then this presidency is
not an aberration. It is a continuation of what helped
found this country, of the white supremacist violence that has
built this country through slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, mass incarceration
now and so, so once we understand that, once we
(37:51):
see this president as simply a symptom, I mean, the
ugliest form of that symptom, so vivid, so in front
of our faces every day. But if we just remove him,
all of the institutions that were founded on those beliefs,
all of the cultural norms that that moved through him
and his body and breath, right like, those don't go away,
and all of his supporters don't either. So what we're
(38:13):
talking about is a much longer transition. And this is
the timeline. I know we're looking to November, and it
doesn't matter. I mean, I really do want to unseat
this president because then we give ourselves a chance to
labor for our nation instead of just being in crisis
response mode. And that's what too many of us did
right under Obomber. Like it's done we went home, and
it's like no, no, Actually, the window opens, the labor begins, begins,
(38:37):
because this moment that we are in, we are in
a much larger transition moment. Within twenty five years, the
number of people of color will exceed the number of
white people for the first time since colonization. So, yes,
we are at a crossroads. Will we continue to descend
into a kind of civil war, a power struggle with
people who want to return America to a past where
(38:58):
certain class of white people hold power, or will we
begin to birth a nation that has never been on
the face of this planet, a nation made up of
other nations, a nation that is truly multiracial, multi faith, multicultural,
where we see no stranger. Those are the stakes. And
(39:19):
when with climate change, you know what time is running out? Yeah? Yeah,
what we do what our generation does not just between
now and November, but past November. Oh, it matters. It
matters not only for the future of our country. How
we citizen matters for the future of the earth and
for the future of humanity. I literally couldn't have said
it better myself. Now. Normally, when you got a show
(39:41):
called How to Citizen with Baritun Day and your guests
says something that powerful. You cut the interview. It's over.
That's a wrap. But I couldn't let it go at that.
Valerie said one more thing that I think you need
to hear. So check out what she did and learned
(40:02):
about herself on election night. On election night, I keep
going back there because we're about to experience another election night.
Right as the results came in, I remember, you know, horror,
seizing my my body and my hand on my mouth,
and my son, who was almost two at the time,
(40:25):
tugged my sleeve and said, dance time, mommy. And I
looked at my husband saying, not tonight, I mean, how
the last thing. And my husband looked at me and
he just shrugs, you know, and he says, your rules,
you said every night, looks I like to lay the rules. Okay.
So we turned down the music and in the first beginning,
(40:45):
oh my god, barre to me. I was so miserable.
I was just weighing back and forth. I just felt
like I was a zombie, so dead. And my son,
you know, baby, your fire, your work, and he leaps
into my arms and suddenly he's like, throw me up, mommy.
Boom boom, boom, even writers on the room set them up,
and he's squealing and he's laughing, and suddenly I'm laughing
(41:08):
and he's dancing and I'm dancing, and baritune day we
were dancing on election night. I mean, I just anyone
who may have like seen into your home from a distance,
I can imagine what they're thinking, which is like, those
are not the people I would have thought celebrating tonight,
But hey, is America's that's right. Afterwards, I felt this
(41:33):
energy rising up in my body which I can only
describe as as joy. And I thought, oh, in the
sick faith, it's called nicola ever rising spirits, even in
the darkness, joyfulness, even in the labor. And I thought, oh,
joy is our greatest act of moral resistance. Joy returns
(41:55):
us to everything that is good and beautiful and worth
fighting for, Joe. It will give us energy in this
long labor for justice. So how are you protecting your
joy every day? Yo? So you feel that too? Right?
That mind expansion, that heart expansion, that dopeness of Valerie Cower,
(42:21):
who I knew was powerful. That's why I booked her.
But yeoh, she blew me out the water. And I'm
still hearing her words. I'm hearing her say there are
no such things as monsters in this world, only human
beings who have been wounded. I'm hearing her say, love ourselves,
others and our opponents. I'm hearing her say, how we
(42:43):
citizen matters for the future of the earth and the
future of humanity. I mean, no pressure, new show. Wow.
We make this show for you, not just to listen to,
not just to watch, and we have video as well.
We make this show to give us all the to
practice how to citizen, to turn our outrage and our
(43:04):
energy into actions that were taken together on the topics
we explore in this series, we'll have an impact on
our communities. Like I said at the beginning of this show,
how the citizen at its core is about relationships with
ourselves and with others. So in each episode, we're going
to share things you can do internally and externally to
(43:25):
strengthen your citizen practice. When I call it a citizen practice,
it reminds me of my older sister Belinda and her
yoga studio and her yoga practice. So this is for you.
This for this episode, here's what you can do. We've
adapted something straight out of Valorie's book see No Stranger.
It's a writing exercise and we want you to spend
(43:48):
fifteen minutes on it to reflect internally on these five prompts. Now,
this reflection is about the journey, not the destination. This
is not about having the right answers or the shortest
one word answers that are going to assure you a
great grade. We're not grading. Spend some time, breathe into
(44:09):
this and push out the answers that feel most true
for you. Laying this kind of foundation is going to
be important later as we start taking actions focused a
bit more on external relationships with others. So the five prompts.
Number one, what is your superpower in our fight to
(44:29):
make society better for us all? Is it your voice?
Is your depen? Is it a bank account? Number two?
What protects you and who has your back when things
get tough? Number three? Who is your beloved community, your
revolutionary pocket, the group of people you connect most with,
the group that will show up when things get tough.
(44:51):
Number four? What object or activity will ground and center
you and remind you of who you are? Number five?
Where do you find joy? And what are you going
to do every day? To protect that joy. We would
love to hear, see, or just read your reflections to
any or all of these questions. Email us old school
(45:15):
action at how to citizen dot com. Help us out
by mentioning episode zero or prelude in the subject line.
We are so grateful to Valerie Coward for helping us
give birth to this show. Please check out her Revolutionary
Love Project dot com or dive into her book and
curriculum at See No Stranger dot com and follow her
(45:38):
on Twitter at Valerie Cower V A L A R
I E K A. You are and if you like
what you experienced here, please share this show. Leave review
five stars is my humble suggestion, and sign up from
my newsletter at baritunda dot com, where I will announce
(45:59):
the upcoming live tapings and more from audience members like you.
You can even send me a text to two O
two eight nine four eight four four let me know
you found me by just putting the word citizens, so
I know where you came from and I'll send you
updates that way as well. How do Citizen with barrattun
Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts, Executive
(46:22):
produced by Nick Stump, Miles Gray Elizabeth Stewart and barrattun
Day Thirsty, Produced by Joel Smith, Edited by Justin Smith,
Power by You,
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!